Michiko
Kakutani did not actually name Donald Trump in her
New
York Times review of
Volker Ullrich’s Hitler:
Ascent, 1889-1939,
but the review was hard to read as anything but a comparison.
“Regardless of whether this review was intended as an article
length Trump subtweet, that’s the reception it’s
getting,” wrote a Washington
Post observer.

In
a way, those who saw Trump in Kakutani’s review were doing history
since comparison is one of the tools by which historians try to
understand the past. But does comparing Trump to Hitler or Trumpism
to fascism elucidate either of them? Or does it warrant the charge
of Godwin’s
Law?

I
raised the issue with sixteen historians of fascist-era Germany,
Italy, Japan, and Spain, asking whether they would define Trump as a
fascist and leaving them to decide how broadly they defined the term.

The
vast majority did not consider Trump a fascist, with the most common
specific objection that Trump does not lead a coherent movement with
a specific ethos. “He has no normal political organization as
distinct from a publicity team,” responded Stanley Payne, a noted
authority on fascism history. “The major fascist movements
certainly did, almost by definition.”

The
second most common objection was that Trump is not undergirded by a
paramilitary or that he does not advocate more political violence,
granting his comments about
“Second Amendment people.”

A
few scholars said the definition of fascism is so limited that it
cannot be applied outside the context of the 1920s-1940s. “As I see
it,” David D. Roberts wrote, “fascism was a trajectory or process
that exhausted itself.”

Most
of the historians I asked named many similarities between Trump and
Hitler, as Kakutani seemed to do, but almost all qualified them as
particulars or matters of rhetorical style rather than sufficient
proof of fascism.

About
half thought a comparison with Mussolini was more apt. They cited
Trump’s “I and I
alone”
demagoguery, his “exaggerated masculinity,” his attempt to
synthesize notions of the left and right, his stress on leading a
movement instead of a party, and his claim to be uniquely outside the
system.

Instead
of finding the similarities between Trump and Hitler convincing, many
of the respondents found it far more compelling to compare the
historical moments in which fascism and Trump arose. Academic
historians’ focus on context should not be surprising since they
are masters at analyzing the contexts for past events, trends, and
people. It’s how they explain how things came to be.

Harvard
historian of modern Japan, Andrew Gordon, told me that he thinks
there are “overlaps” in “the contexts that in the past are
understood to have generated fascism or support for it and in the
context of the US today.”

“Trump
has tapped into some impulses or segments of American society that
resemble fascist impulses and constituencies,” wrote Michael Ebner,
an expert on Mussolini’s Italy at Syracuse, like, “Xenophobia,
focus on internal enemies of the nation, … protectionism.”

Professor
Marla Stone, author of The
Fascist Revolution in Italy, responded
that she is struck by comparisons to the German and Italian contexts
in which so many were “willing to support a candidate who clearly
states his intention to rule outside the confines of democracy. The
loss of faith in democratic institutions and the democratic process
is a striking similarity.”

Sasha
Pack, who teaches comparative fascism at SUNY Buffalo does not think
Trumpism is fascism, and sees many differences in the two historical
conditions that gave rise to each, but said that, “the parallels
are worth pointing out anyway, not because they have predictive
value, but because they provide an analytical exercise to help us
better understand the Trump movement.”

Perhaps
that’s the value of Kakutani’s review and the fact that so many
readers seemed to draw their own comparisons—it amounted to an
analytical exercise.

Yet
it could be that historians’ concern about the similarities between
fascist and Trumpist historical moments is scarier than Kakutani’s
implicit comparison. Candidates come and go, while contexts tend to
be long-lasting. Trump seems on course to lose the election, but the
conditions that allowed his rise should persist. Professor Roberts,
who just published a new book, Fascist
Interactions, does
not think that Trumpism is fascism, but “that doesn’t rule out
the possibility,” he wrote, that from the Trumpist atmosphere,
“something as bad as or even worse than fascism could emerge.”

No,
historians don’t engage in prediction, but their work and what they
see in this election certainly inclines them to expect something bad
could always emerge.